Description

2021 press on black and metallic silver galaxy merge. Limited to 2000 copies

Mareridt (Nightmare) is the sophomore long-player from Danish-born singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Myrkur (Amalie Bruun). The album not only bridges the stylistic diversity of her three previous releases — the 2015 album M and two EPS — but extends their reach into her own creative space, which cannot easily be defined. The music is grounded in an intensely personal iconography — musical, spiritual, cultural, psychological, emotional, and mythological. These atmospheric songs are also imbued with the intense influence of the natural world. Recorded in Copenhagen and Seattle these songs illuminate the most intimate aspects of Myrkur’s interior dimensions. She plays piano, nykelharpa, violin, guitar, percussion, synth, and organ. She even does some “kulning” (a cow-herding call from the Swedish folk tradition that she’s mastered). The title refers to a period where she was nearly crippled by sleep paralysis induced by nightmares. She learned to confront them by obsessively writing them down, then illustrating them musically. The album’s finest moment is “Ulvinde,” where it seems that Loreena McKennitt, Dead Can Dance, folk, black metal, and ambient music become one in Mykur’s ambitious musicality. Mareridt is a work of atavistic mystery, unflinching honesty, and balance. It embraces everything from horror and beauty to the sacred and profane; its creator has encountered them all within, faced and accepted them, and ultimately woven them into the fabric of her being as music.

Track list:
1. Mareridt
2. Måneblot
3. The Serpent
4. Crown
5. Elleskudt
6. De Tre Piker
7. Funeral
8. Ulvinde
9. Gladiatrix
10. Kætteren
11. Börnehjem